Over the Hill and its companion work Down Hill depict the artist Joan Jonas moving through the Pine Barrens, a landscape to which Nancy Holt returned frequently. These photographic works invite reflection on how the human body shapes our understanding of scale and time within the landscape. Each element of the composite images captures Jonas walking across sand dunes, her footprints briefly marking the surface of the earth. Holt referred to Jonas in these works as “my Woman in the Dunes,” a direct reference to Woman in the Dunes, directed by Hiroshi Teshigahara.

In the early 2010s, Holt organized her early photographs into distinct series, producing inkjet prints from scans of the original transparencies. In some instances, as seen here, she created composite images to record the movement of the human body through space. Holt emphasized that the works should retain the dates of their original making. Jonas, a close friend of both Holt and Robert Smithson, appears in the production of several of their artworks.